We all have a ton going on but I wanted to provide two pieces of information that I hope can make an impact.
I am sure you are aware of American Express Merchant Financing. I didn't expect it but it is still available and providing rapid 12 month working capital loans at reasonable rates (the same rates they have for years when the sky wasn’t falling). In two hours I received approval for same day funding of up to $120k for my restaurant in Boston.
Honestly, I was surprised given what is happening. We didn't take the full amount and you can pull what you need, but thought it was very cool of American Express to keep that line open during these crazy times.
To be clear MarginEdge has no relationship at all with AmEx and this is not a formal endorsement, but we do know many of our clients are feeling the effects of having to unwind negative working capital (i.e. paying salaries and vendors when cash stops coming in) and working capital is in definite demand. We are also watching closely for Federal SBA Disaster assistance and other potential government assistance and will keep you posted.
Second, we heard from many of you that in the face of the countless, high impact decisions you are making for your business right now having daily insights would be helpful. We hope to send this information out each morning, and continue to refine the views based on current events and your requests.
At the bottom of this note you will see the YoY daily trends over the last seven days, divided out by markets where we have a larger sample size of partners.
We encourage you to forward this note to anyone in your network. In an effort to support our industry while also improving our data set we are offering our basic platform (pulls daily sales from your POS and pushes to accounting) for free for 90 days. Our hope is that we can provide meaningful business level insights during this chaotic time while also improving the quality and granularity of our data to share across our community.
We continue to monitor all stimulus information and are working on aggregating our data, state and federal support updates and ideas from our community for creative approaches for managing this time. We will share all details as they become available.
No doubt these are unprecedented times, but there is also no doubt that we are a resilient bunch and we are stronger together. Please stay in touch with any other ways we can support.
Stay safe,
Bo